Meet Your Neighbor: Student enjoys stretching limits of knowledge

Drew Matteson, a Randall High School junior, enjoys brain-straining mathematical and scientific questions that leave most people befuddled.

For instance, if a three-dimensional object such as a cube or a person casts a two-dimensional, flat shadow, then what kind of an object would cast a three-dimensional shadow?

The answer, Matteson says, is a hyper-dimensional object. And exactly what a hyper-dimensional object looks like is hard to convey in a three-dimensional world.

"It's impossible to visualize in its true form," Matteson said, although he compared it to when soap bubbles conjoin. "It's really amazing. I think it's incredibly beautiful - a hyper-dimensional solid with no dimensional corollary."

Nevertheless, Matteson spends time conceptualizing them in his head and building balsa-wood representations of them. Last year for a science project, he devised formulas to, uh, how did you put it, Drew?

"I developed equations to predict the nature of solids in any dimension," he said. Although practical use of such math is still a ways off, it begins to apply when looking at things really large, like the universe, or really small, like in crystals, he said.

His was one of 1,238 projects, selected from 3 million worldwide, on display at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Although Matteson gets restless when he's not learning something new, math and science don't completely dominate his life, he said. He plays trumpet in the school band and goes out with his friends on the weekends.

He said he hopes to compete again in this year's science fair, eventually go into a research field related to private industry, and always keep "stretching the limits of what I know."